Norton Update Caused Internet Explorer to Crash

Symantec customers started flooding the company’s Norton Community forum on Friday with posts about an update that caused the Internet Explorer web browser to crash.

After analyzing the complaints, the security firm determined that the problem was triggered by a corrupt file in the virus definition set. The buggy update was the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) 20150220.001 definition package.

According to Symantec, the corrupt IPS definition package caused the 32-bit version of Internet Explorer to crash on computers running Norton Security, Norton Security with Backup, Norton 360, and Norton Internet Security. Other Web browsers don’t appear to be affected.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1 might also be impacted, but only if the client receives content from a pre-RU2 Symantec Endpoint Protection Management (SEPM) server, or if the client is pre-RU2 and runs LiveUpdate directly to Symantec.

The company addressed the issue by releasing a new version of the 20150220.001 definition package through the LiveUpdate service.

“Definition package updates are automatically deployed by Norton and Symantec Endpoint Protection every four hours, unless users manually download them for unmanaged computers or administrators manually deploy them to their managed clients from the SEP Management Server. Users can also manually deploy the update before it is deployed automatically,” Symantec noted in an advisory.

The company has also published a help page for users who encountered this issue.

This isn’t the only problem reported recently by Symantec customers. In December, Norton users started complaining about getting blue screens of death (BSOD) on Windows 8.1 when mounting TrueCrypt volumes. Symantec still hasn’t come up with a permanent fix for the issue.

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.